More Saturday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Musk/Trump: Laying the Foundations For the Next Financial Crisis

Since Reagan many on the political right have demonized government regulation and sought to reduce or eliminate regulations that benefit the majority of Americans. Much of corporate America is only too happy to jump on this bandwagon and would love to return to the robber baron area that ran wild during the late 1800's and first years of the 20th century.  Regulations impede unfettered profits and the GOP at the state and federal level have been only too happy to grant the wishes of their corporate donors.  Hence the erosion of child labor laws in some red states, attacks on clean air and clean water regulations, and efforts to reduce labor safety standards.  Now, Musk/the Felon are out to cut financial regulations - even as they push to shred the social safety net for everyday Americans - and are setting the stage for future financial crisis as greed runs amuck. Learning from the past is seemingly an unknown concept and maximizing short term profits is more important than anything else.  A piece by a Nobel Prize winning economist looks at the dangerous measures the Felon and his co-president are taking in the financial markets realm.  Here are highlights:

Sometimes — actually, quite often — it seems as if the Musk/Trump [regime] administration tries to undermine successful government policies precisely because they’ve been successful.

It’s hard, for example, to see whose interests Trump is serving by trying to kill New York’s congestion pricing scheme, which is already showing clear positive results, including a noticeable decline in traffic accidents.

This behavior may in part reflect the right-wing insistence, going back to Reagan, that government can never be a force for good, a doctrine right-wingers try to validate when they’re in power. Part of it may reflect jealousy: Trump, and only Trump, is allowed to have policy successes.

But it’s also surely part of the effort to flood the zone — to do so many bad things at the same time that it’s hard to focus on any one outrage. And I’m sorry to say that this strategy often works. In a week in which Trump has firmly allied himself with Russian aggression while falsely claiming that millions of dead people receive Social Security, how many people noticed Tuesday’s executive order that appears to be an effort to strip the Federal Reserve of its ability to oversee and regulate Wall Street?

This is, however, important. The Musk/Trump administration has been weakening financial regulation across the board. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which aims to shield Americans from fraud, has been shut down. All of the agencies that try to supervise and regulate financial institutions, other than the Fed, are now being run by people hostile to the very idea of regulation.

And all of this couldn’t be happening at a worse moment. MAGA may well be laying the foundations for the next financial crisis.

Economists have known for a long time — more than 250 years — that financial institutions should be regulated. Libertarians often invoke Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations for its advocacy of laissez-faire economic policies. But even Smith, who had witnessed the Panic of 1772 that hit Scotland, London and Amsterdam — arguably the first modern banking crisis — called for significant restrictions on banks,

The 21^st-century financial system is, of course, far more complex than that of the 18^th century, although there are some echoes.

Did I mention that Howard Lutnick is now the Commerce Secretary? Lutnick has had close financial ties to Tether, which Bloomberg describes as “the stablecoin used by drug traffickers, terrorists and scammers to move money around the world.”

And crypto aside, the complexity of modern finance makes it even harder for both consumers and investors to assess banking risks, so we need effective financial regulation to avoid or at least limit financial crises.

Yet the Musk/Trump administration is moving to loosen if not eviscerate financial regulation. And it’s doing so at an especially dangerous time.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis I, like many economists, became a fan of Hyman Minsky’s “financial instability hypothesis.” At a time when many economists were arguing that financial markets are generally efficient in the sense that asset prices reflect the best information available, Minsky argued instead that they are driven by cycles of greed and fear.

In the aftermath of a financial crisis, investors are well aware that markets can go down as well as up. They are cautious about taking risks, and especially about leveraging up — investing with borrowed money. And as a result of this caution, financial markets are calm with relatively few crises.

Over time, however, memories of past disasters fade, in part because those who remember bad things retire or move on, replaced by younger traders who have never experienced a major crisis. This eventually produces markets in which prices seem to go in only one direction — up — and whoever is most willing to take leveraged risks wins.

This manic phase doesn’t just induce many people to take on risks they don’t understand. It also creates what the famed investor James Chanos calls a “golden age of fraud.”

When it seems as if fortune favors the brave, con men or, sometimes, con women find it especially easy to attract suckers, especially if they can hang their promises on a narrative — say, the wonders of crypto or the limitless potential of AI.

The New York Times recently ran a heartbreaking story about how the president of a community-owned bank in Elkhart, Kansas fell for a crypto scam, destroying the bank and quite a few people’s life savings in the process. You can be sure that we’ll hear many more such stories once we reach the final stage of the cycle — the Minsky moment, when euphoria-driven asset price surges give way to fire sales as highly leveraged investors desperately try to raise cash.

Where do regulators fit into all of this? They can’t completely eliminate the Minsky cycle, which is deeply rooted in human psychology. But they can dampen it and limit the damage when the Minsky moment arrives.

[T]he extensive financial regulations introduced in the 1930s produced a 50-year “quiet period” in which there were plenty of stock market ups and downs — notably the “go-go years” of the 1960s followed by the very depressed market of the 1970s — but there weren’t any serious banking crises.

But politicians are subject to the same mood swings as investors, so they tend to push regulators to loosen up precisely when they should be trying to rein in irrational exuberance. . . . . now the Trump [regime] administration wants to cut the Fed out of the loop.

Most observers believe that when — not if — the reckoning comes, it won’t be as bad as 2008. That’s probably true. It doesn’t look as if banks and quasi-banks are as exposed as they were back then, so there may be less disruption to the financial system. But one lesson from 2008 is that an ever-changing financial system sometimes creates risks that nobody realized were there until things fall apart.

Furthermore, a crisis doesn’t have to be as bad as 2008 to be very bad indeed.

And let’s not ignore the fact that if a crisis comes any time in the next few years, the Musk/Trump Administration will be in charge of handling the response. If that thought makes you feel confident, maybe you want to buy some more Melania coins

More Saturday Male Beauty

 

MAGA Has Found a New Frightening Model

Project 2025 which the Felon is rapidly implementing is a white "Christian" nationalist/white supremacist agenda aimed at taking America back to the 1950's when nonwhites in may parts of the nation still lived under Jim Crow, gays remained hidden in the shadows and white males reigned supreme.  The felon's regime is rapidly scrubbing references to racial minorities and LGBT individuals from government agency web sites and the senior leadership of the nation's military is being purged of women and blacks.  The Felon's promises of lowering prices are long forgotten and the stock market is falling over concerns of the negative impacts of the Felon's tariffs on inflation and the economy not to mention the shredding of past trade alliances. On the international stage, the Felon is acting as a Russian asset and he and his spineless minions are insulting long time allies and parroting Russian propaganda. Equally disturbing is the embrace of the far right party in Germany that in many ways is trying to rewrite history and rehabilitate aspects of Hitler's Nazi regime,  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the new MAGA model that ought to frighten thinking and moral Americans.  Here are excerpts:

LAST MONTH, upwards of 1 million people flooded the streets of Germany to express their opposition to the right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland, or Alternative for Germany. In Berlin, more than 100,000 people gathered on the Bundestag lawn under a banner reading Defend democracy: Together against the right.

The message Germans were sending was clear, Paul Hockenos, a Berlin-based journalist, wrote in Foreign Policy: “The AfD’s stripe of right-wing radicalism is out of place in democratic Germany.” But not, apparently, in democratic America.

In January, Elon Musk, one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers, appeared via video at a campaign event in Halle on behalf of the AfD, urging those in attendance not to be ashamed of its nation’s history. . . . in an obvious reference to the Nazi era, Musk said there is “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.”

“I think you really are the best hope for Germany,” Musk told the 4,000 AfD supporters. Musk also published an op-ed in Welt am Sonntag, urging Germans to vote for the AfD. The paper’s Opinion editor resigned in protest.

But that was just the start of the Trump administration’s embrace of the AfD. Last week, Vice President J. D. Vance gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference that the German media called a “campaign gift” to the AfD prior to the German elections tomorrow.

In an extraordinary act of intervention into the internal affairs of an ally, Vance essentially urged the next German government to include the AfD, which has so far been treated as a pariah party, in the governing coalition. The Trump administration wants to destroy the firewall that has been built around the AfD. It’s worth understanding why it was erected in the first place.

GERMANY’S DOMESTIC INTELLIGENCE AGENCY has classified part of the AfD, founded in 2013, as extremist, warning that it is a “danger to democracy.” (In 2017, the AfD became the first far-right party to enter the German Parliament since World War II.)

Much of the attention has focused on Björn Höcke, a history teacher who heads a faction of the AfD, known as “The Wing” (Der Flügel ), in the state of Thuringia. Höcke has“used metaphors reminiscent of Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist,” The New York Times reported, “saying that Germans need to be wolves rather than sheep.” He has talked about racial suicide and “cultural Bolshevism.” At a 2017 rally in Dresden, Höcke called on Germans to make a “180 degree” turn in the way they viewed their history. . . . Höcke wants to revive the word Lebensraum—a term used by the Nazis that means “living space.” And he seems offended that Adolf Hitler has been described as “absolutely evil.” (“The world has—man has—shades of gray,” Höcke said when asked about Hitler.

The AfD, which has most of its support in the formerly Communist eastern part of Germany, was defined at its outset by opposition to the common European currency; within a couple of years, it has become pro-Russian and embraced xenophobia, and now defines itself as committed to preserving German identity and nationalism. It has ties to neo-Nazi activists and the extremist Identitarian Movement, including discussing a “re-migration” plan which, according to Hockenos, would “forcibly repatriate millions of people.”

THE TRUMP [REGIME] ADMINISTRATION’S embrace of the AfD is the latest example of it casting its lot with right-wing European movements. It not only wants to destroy the transatlantic alliance; it is supporting parties that are extreme and enemies of classical liberalism. But there’s an additional twist in what we’re witnessing.

For Vance and Musk to go so far out of their way to support not just any rising radical movement, but this particular party, in this particular country, with its deep historical experiences with fascism, is quite telling. They are not just “trolling the libs”; they are giving their public backing to a movement that represents the core convictions of MAGA world. They see in the AfD an undiluted version of MAGA. What we’re now witnessing from Trump & Company, as alarming as it is now, is only a way station.

And before you know it, virtually everyone in the Republican Party will be on board. Trump always changes them; they never change him. The AfD’s approach to politics—nihilism with a touch of Nazi sympathizing—is the model.

However the AfD does in the German elections tomorrow, it has already won the hearts and minds of the most powerful men in America.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

Trump and Vance Are Sending a Dark Message to America’s Allies

The Felon, Elon Musk and the Felon's appointees are displaying incredible amounts of hubris (much like a ego mad crime boss and his henchmen running a protection racket) as they wreak havoc across the federal government and are quickly betraying the MAGA base which at some point - likely not soon enough - wake up to the reality that "owning the libs" will be nowhere enough to compensate them for lost benefits, lost medical coverage, higher prices and the marginalizing of America on the world stage.  The Felon's embrace of Putin and the open contempt on display for America's long time allies will frighteningly probably carry a high price over the longer term.  Sadly, until the MAGA base wakes up to what they have done to themselves - and the rest of the American citizenry - the Felon appears dead set on destroying America's alliances and pandering to to dictators and war criminals like Putin.  As a piece in The Atlantic lays out Europe and the European Union in particular need to  (i) face America's betrayal and lack of being a trustworthy partner and (ii) arm itself and step into the vacuum left by a disloyal America.  Here are article excerpts:

For eight decades, America’s alliances with other democracies have been the bedrock of American foreign policy, trade policy, and cultural influence. American investments in allies’ security helped keep the peace in formerly unstable parts of the world, allowing democratic societies from Germany to Japan to prosper, by preventing predatory autocracies from destroying them. We prospered too. Thanks to its allies, the U.S. obtained unprecedented political and economic influence in Europe and Asia, and unprecedented power everywhere else.

The Trump administration is now bringing the post–World War II era to an end. No one should be surprised: This was predictable, and indeed was predicted. Donald Trump has been a vocal opponent of what he considers to be the high cost of U.S. alliances, since 1987, when he bought full-page ads in three newspapers, claiming that “for decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.”

In his first term as president, Trump’s Cabinet members and advisers repeatedly restrained him from insulting allies or severing military and diplomatic links. Now he has surrounded himself with people who are prepared to enact and even encourage the radical changes he always wanted, cheered on by thousands of anonymous accounts on X. Of course America’s relations with allies are complex and multilayered, and in some form they will endure. But American allies, especially in Europe, need to face up to this new reality and make some dramatic changes.

This shift began with what felt at first like ad hoc, perhaps unserious attacks on the sovereignty of Denmark, Canada, and Panama. Events over the past week or so have provided further clarification. At a major multinational security conference in Munich last weekend, I sat in a room full of defense ministers, four-star generals and security analysts—people who procure ammunition for Ukrainian missile defense, or who worry about Russian ships cutting fiber optic cables in the Baltic Sea. All of them were expecting Vice President J. D. Vance to address these kinds of concerns. Instead, Vance told a series of misleading stories designed to demonstrate that European democracies aren’t democratic.

Vance, a prominent member of the political movement that launched the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, had to know what he was doing: flipping the narrative, turning arguments upside down in the manner of a Russian propagandist. . . . . he gave a speech that wasn’t about the very real Russian threat to the continent at all: He was telling the Europeans present that he wasn’t interested in discussing their security. They got the message.

A few days before the Munich conference, the U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went to Kyiv and presented President Volodymyr Zelensky with a two-page document and asked him to sign. Details of this proposed agreement began to leak last weekend. It calls for the U.S. to take 50 percent of all “economic value associated with resources of Ukraine,” including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure,” not just now but forever . . .

Europeans have contributed more resources to Ukraine’s military and economic survival than the U.S. has—despite Trump’s repeated, untruthful claims to the contrary—but would presumably be cut out of this deal. The Ukrainians, who have suffered hundreds of thousands of military and civilian casualties, whose cities have been turned to rubble, whose national finances have been decimated, and whose personal lives have been disrupted, are offered nothing in exchange for half their wealth: No security guarantees, no investment. These terms resemble nothing so much as the Versailles Treaty imposed on a defeated Germany after World War I, and are dramatically worse than those imposed on Germany and Japan after World War II. As currently written, they could not be carried out under Ukrainian law.

The cruelty of the document is remarkable, as are its ambiguities. People who have seen it say that it does not explain exactly which Americans would be the beneficiaries of this deal. Perhaps the American government? Perhaps the president’s friends and business partners? . . . But the document at least served to reiterate Vance’s message, and to add a new element: The U.S. doesn’t need or want allies—unless they can pay.

Trump made this new policy even clearer during a press conference on Tuesday, when he made a series of false statements about Ukraine that he later repeated in social-media posts. No, Ukraine did not start the war; Russia launched the invasion, Russia is still attacking Ukraine, and Russia could end the war today if it stopped attacking Ukraine. No, the U.S. did not spend “$350 billion” in Ukraine. No, Volodymyr Zelensky does not have “four percent” popularity; the real number is more than 50 percent, higher than Trump’s.

I can’t tell you exactly why Trump chose to repeat these falsehoods, or why his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, once made a TikTok video of herself repeating them, or why they directly echo the Russian propaganda that has long sought to portray Zelensky, along with the nation of Ukraine itself, as illegitimate. Plenty of Republicans, including some I met in Munich, know that these claims aren’t true. American allies must draw a lesson: Trump is demonstrating that he can and will align himself with whomever he wants—Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, perhaps eventually with Xi Jinping—in defiance of past treaties and agreements. In order to bully Ukraine into signing unfavorable deals, he is even willing to distort reality.

In these circumstances, everything is up for grabs, any relationship is subject to bargaining. . . . Zelensky is trying to acquire other kinds of leverage too. This week he flew to Istanbul, where the Turkish leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, reaffirmed his support for Ukraine’s sovereignty, in defiance of the U.S.

Europeans need to act in the same spirit and acquire some leverage too. At the start of this war, international financial institutions froze $300 billion of Russian assets, mostly in Europe. There are sound legal and moral arguments for seizing these assets and giving them to Ukraine, both to reconstruct the country and to allow Ukrainians to continue to defend themselves. Now there are urgent political reasons too. This is enough money to impress Trump; to buy weapons, including American weapons; and to spook the Russians into fearing that the war will not end as quickly as they now hope.

Europeans also need to create, immediately, a coalition of the willing that is prepared to militarily defend Ukraine, as well as other allies who might be attacked in future. Deterrence has a psychological component. . . . Now that the U.S. has become unpredictable, Europeans have to provide the deterrence themselves. There is talk of a defense bank to finance new military investment, but that’s just the beginning. They need to radically increase military spending, planning, and coordination. If they speak and act as a group, Europeans will have more power and more credibility than if they speak separately.

Sometime in the future, historians will wonder what might have been, what kind of peace could have been achieved, if Trump had done what he himself suggested doing a few weeks ago: keep up military aid for Ukraine; tighten sanctions on Russia; bully the aggressors, not their victims, into suing for peace. Perhaps we might also someday find out who or what, exactly, changed his mind, why he chose to follow a policy that seems designed to encourage not just Russia but Russia’s allies in China, Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Cuba, and Venezuela.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

Trump’s Bullying Is Going to Backfire

One of the most striking things about today's political right - pushed on by the ignorance embracing "conservative" Christians key to the MAGA base - is the willing rejection of science and knowledge if it runs counter to the MAGA base's religious myths and prejudices, if not out right hatred, towards anyone deemed "other" based on race, skin color, national origin and/or sexual orientation. This willful embrace of ignorance extends to the realm of economics and the reality of today's global economy.  Few, if any countries now can make complex products and equipment solely within their own borders without materials and knowledge from around the globe. This cluelessness and ignorance is embodied in the Felon's threats of tariffs and maligning of trading partners.  Either the Felon is out to deliberately blow up America's economy - perhaps on orders from Vladimir Putin - or his level of ignorance is stunning.  Surrounded by "yes men" no one seemingly can give him a much needed slap in the face and say wake up to reality.  The result may well be a weakened, poorer, and more unequal America - something that will thrill and embolden our adversaries.  A column in the New York Times looks at this dangerous situation:

The scariest thing about what President Trump is doing with his tariffs-for-all strategy, I believe, is that he has no clue what he is doing — or how the world economy operates, for that matter. He’s just making it all up as he goes along — and we are all along for the ride.

I am not against using tariffs to counter unfair trade practices. I supported Trump and President Joe Biden’s tariffs on China. And if all of this is just Trump bluffing to get other countries to give us the same access that we give them, I am OK with it. But Trump has never been clear: Some days he says his tariffs are to raise revenue, other days to force everyone to invest in America, other days to keep out fentanyl.

So, which is it?

Trump is threatening to impose tariffs on rivals and allies alike, without any satisfactory explanation of why one is being tariffed and the other not, and regardless of how such tariffs might hurt U.S. industry and consumers. It’s a total mess. As the Ford Motor chief executive Jim Farley courageously (compared to other chief executives) pointed out, “Let’s be real honest: Long term, a 25 percent tariff across the Mexico and Canada borders would blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we’ve never seen.”

So, either Trump wants to blow that hole, or he’s bluffing, or he is clueless. If it is the latter, Trump is going to get a crash course in the hard realities of the global economy as it really is — not how he imagines it.

My favorite tutor in these matters is the Oxford University economist Eric Beinhocker, who got my attention when we were talking the other day with the following simple statement: “No country in the world alone can make an iPhone.”

Think about that sentence for a moment: There is no single country or company on earth that has all the knowledge or parts or manufacturing prowess or raw materials that go into that device in your pocket called an iPhone. Apple says it assembles its iPhone and computers and watches with the help of “thousands of businesses and millions of people in more than 50 countries and regions”

The big difference between the era we are in now, as opposed to the one Trump thinks he’s living in, is that today it’s no longer “the economy, stupid.” That was the Bill Clinton era. Today, “it’s the ecosystems, stupid.”

Ecosystems? Listen a bit to Beinhocker, who is also the executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School. In the real world, he argues, “There is no such thing as the American economy anymore that you can identify in any real, tangible way. There’s just this accounting fiction that we call U.S. G.D.P.” To be sure, he says, “There are American interests in the economy. . . . . There are firms based in America. But there is no American economy in that isolated sense.”

Instead, there is a global web of commercial, manufacturing, services and trading “ecosystems,” explains Beinhocker. “There is an automobile ecosystem. There’s an A.I. ecosystem. There’s a smartphone ecosystem. There’s a drug development ecosystem. There is the chip-making ecosystem.” And the people, parts and knowledge that make up those ecosystems all move back and forth across many economies.

Trump just waves off all of this. He told reporters that the U.S. is not reliant on Canada. “We don’t need them to make our cars,” he said.

Actually, we do. And thank goodness for that. It not only enables us to make cars cheaper, but also better. All that a Model T did was get you from point to point faster than a horse, but today’s cars offer you heating and cooling and entertainment from the internet and satellites. They will navigate for you and even drive for you — and they’re much safer. When we can combine more complex knowledge and complex parts to solve complex problems, our quality of life soars.

But here’s the catch. You cannot make complex stuff alone anymore. It’s too complex.

In a 2021 essay on the website of the Yale School of Public Health, Swati Gupta, head of emerging infectious diseases at I.A.V.I., a nonprofit scientific research organization, explained how mRNA vaccines for Covid-19 were developed in record time: . . . . There was unprecedented global collaboration through coordinated partnerships among governments, industry, donor organizations, nonprofits and academia. … It’s the only way we could have achieved what has been seen in the past year, as no one group could have done this alone.”

Ditto today for the most advanced microchips. . . . . The more we push the boundaries of physics and materials science to cram more transistors onto a chip, the less any one company or country can excel at all the parts of the design and manufacturing process. You need the whole global ecosystem.

And if you are not part of these ecosystems, your country will not thrive.”

And trust is the essential ingredient that makes these ecosystems work and grow, Beinhocker adds. Trust acts as both glue and grease. It glues together bonds of cooperation, while at the same time it greases the flows of people, products, capital and ideas from one country to the next. Remove trust and the ecosystems start to collapse.

Trust, though, is built by good rules and healthy relationships, and Trump is trampling on both. The result: If he goes down this road, Trump will make America and the world poorer. Mr. President, do your homework.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

The Hypocrisy of the Right's Culture War

To listen to many on the political right one would believe that conservatives in general, white evangelical "Christians" and white males in particular are have been under attack by "liberal elites"  and are the true victims of discrimination.  Admittedly, some of the word police on the far left went too far in their "wokeness," if you will, but what we are seeing under the Felon's regime and Project 2025's agenda which seeks to restore white supremacy and to marginalize anyone who is not a white "conservative"  - a term that sadly now provides cover for fascists and white supremacists - far exceeds the excesses of the left. Indeed, under the Felon and his worshippers, it is obvious that they are all for discrimination as long as they are the ones doing the discrimination and mistreat of others. Any constraints on their ability to discriminate is falsely labeled anti-Christian or anti-white discrimination.  The hypocrisy is glaring.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the new word police on the right and the effort underway to erase or silence everyone else.  One can only hope a backlash builds quickly.  Here are excerpts:

One of the defining features of the social-justice orthodoxy that swept through American culture between roughly the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 to Hamas’s assault on Israel in 2023 was the policing of language. Many advocates became obsessed with enforcing syntactical etiquette and banishing certain words.

“Wokeness,” as it’s known . . . . . was often a nuisance and sometimes a trap, causing the perpetual sense that one might inadvertently offend and consequently self-destruct. . . . . Those who were judged to have violated the rules could be banned or suspended.

Donald Trump promised that his election would free Americans from ever having to worry about saying the wrong thing again. He even signed an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” But a few weeks into his administration, we hardly find ourselves enjoying a culture of free speech and tolerance for opposing views. Almost immediately, the president did the opposite of what he’d promised and put together his own linguistic proscriptions. Most of the banned words related to gender and diversity, and this time the rules had the force of the government behind them.

“Fear that other words could run afoul of the new edicts led anxious agency officials to come up with lists of potentially problematic words on their own,” wrote Shawn McCreesh in The New York Times. These included: “Equity. Gender. Transgender. Nonbinary. Pregnant people. Assigned male at birth. Antiracist. Trauma. Hate speech. Intersectional. Multicultural. Oppression. Such words were scrubbed from federal websites.”

Plus ça change. The government itself determining the limits of acceptable speech is undeniably far more chilling and pernicious—and potentially unconstitutional—than private actors attempting to do so. But what is most striking about this dismal back-and-forth is how well it demonstrates that the illiberal impulse to dictate what can and cannot be said is always fundamentally the same, whether it appears on the right or the left.

An extraordinary number of conservatives have ignored and even delighted in their side’s astonishing hypocrisy. But a few consistent defenders of free speech have not gone along with what they see as the new “woke right.”

The pervasive and nitpicky control of language is a crucial, but far from the sole, component of the woke-right movement. Like its antithesis on the left, the woke right places identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving at the center of its behavior and thought. One of the best descriptions I can find of it comes from Kevin DeYoung, a pastor and seminary professor, in a 2022 article called “The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism.” DeYoung, reviewing a book on Christian nationalism in The Gospel Coalition, argues that the book’s “apocalyptic vision—for all of its vitriol toward the secular elites—borrows liberally from the playbook of the left.” It “redefines the nature of oppression as psychological oppression” and tells white and male right-wing Americans that they are the country’s real victims.

But “the world is out to get you, and people out there hate you,” DeYoung warns, “is not a message that will ultimately help white men or any other group that considers themselves oppressed.”

Another hallmark of wokeness is an overriding impulse to contest and revise the historical record in service of contemporary debates. The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which reimagined this nation’s founding, was emblematic of this trend from the left. But similar attempts are happening on the right. Last summer, the amateur historian Darryl Cooper caused an uproar when he made the case, on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, that Winston Churchill was the real villain of World War II.

The compelled politesse of the left has been swapped out for the reflexive and gratuitous disrespect of the right. . . . . Speaking of falsifying reality: The Trump administration seems to be devoting a remarkable amount of energy toward making sure people call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” In the White House press room last week, the administration went so far as to eject Associated Press reporters because the publication refused to alter its stylebook to comply with the change. . . . European exploration records have referred to El Golfo de México since the 16th century.

Just as corporations genuflected at the altar of wokeness during and after the summer of 2020 . . . . some of the country’s most prominent companies have preemptively submitted to the woke right’s new power play. Google and Apple have both relabeled the Gulf of Mexico on their map apps with Trump’s risible neologism. And an NPR analysis of regulatory filings found that “at least a dozen of the largest U.S. companies have deleted some, or all, references to ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ and ‘DEI’ from their most recent annual reports to investors.”

Some state leaders are following in Trump’s footsteps. . . . “What the Woke Right fundamentally don’t understand as they make their bid for power now, and why they’ll lose,” Lindsay wrote last week on X, “is that none of us want more ideological crazy stuff. We don’t want another freaking movement. We want to go back to our lives.”

The obligation to call people aliens or unlearn the name of a body of water . . . . . amounts to a politics of brute domination, a forced and demoralizing expression of subservience that only a genuine fanatic could abide.

Voters in both parties are already signaling that the right’s woke antics are unattractive to them. When it comes to its edgelord in chief, Elon Musk, an Economist/YouGov poll found that the share of Republicans who say he should have “a lot” of influence has dropped significantly over the past three months, to 26 percent. Seventeen percent say they want him to have no influence “at all.” Over the past two weeks, Trump’s approval rating has fallen.

The truth is that most Americans bristle at wokeness from whichever direction it arrives. As the left is learning now, no victory can ever be final. The right’s illiberal zeal only creates the conditions for an equal and opposite reaction to come.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

Trump Opens the Door to America's Adversaries

In addition to causing chaos in federal government agencies, firing of thousands of federal employees, and threatening to slash aspects of the social safety net relied upon by millions of Americans - all to fund tax cuts for the obscenely wealth and large corporations - the Felon has opened the door for America's adversaries to step into the gap on humanitarian aid and to interfere with  domestic social media and election campaigns.  Worse yet, he has appointed inexperienced ideologues (some of whom, in my opinion, appear to be foreign agents like the Felon himself) to positions that must be thrilling Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran to name a few.  None of these moves by the Felon's malignant regime make America safer and more secure from actions by adversaries and bad actors.  Meanwhile, much of MAGA world remains blind to the harm to which they are being exposed as the instead celebrate the white "Christian" nationalist agenda of Project 2025.  Sooner or later the reality will sink in that making life miserable for LGBT citizens and racial minorities will not offset the economic pain they will experience, hopefully, sooner as opposed to later.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the new dangers the nation faces:

During Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation hearing, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, both Democrats and Republicans, repeatedly asked the soon-to-be director of national intelligence whether Edward Snowden was a traitor for releasing thousands of classified documents that revealed clandestine U.S. sources and methods. And repeatedly Gabbard declined to condemn Snowden beyond the tepid acknowledgment that he’d broken the law. Even at that, she praised him for exposing a secret program.

All nine Republicans on the Intelligence Committee, and every Republican senator except Mitch McConnell, nonetheless voted to confirm her to lead America’s 18 intelligence agencies. . . . . Gabbard has hardly demonstrated the judgment necessary for the task.

In 2013, overwhelming evidence, including expert U.S.-intelligence analysis, showed that the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons on his people. Gabbard was unwilling to believe it, perhaps because the conclusion did not accord with her preconceived ideas about the Syrian civil conflict. This is the stance of someone likely to either miss or reject warnings of emergent threats. And it’s not the only sign that the Trump administration is putting American security at risk.

Gabbard’s appointment is just one factor leading American allies, including but not limited to the “Five Eyes” states (the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, in addition to the U.S.), to worry about whether they can securely share intelligence with the Trump administration. The Five Eyes extend the geographical reach of U.S. intelligence coverage and provide assessments that can increase or even usefully challenge U.S. findings. This input plays a part in calibrating the confidence that U.S. agencies have in their own conclusions.

Without allied cooperation, Washington will soon be operating on a fraction of the insight it once had into foreign threats. And the U.S. will need that supplemental intelligence more than ever, because the Trump administration has hobbled its own premier intelligence-gathering agency by offering career-terminating buyouts to all CIA employees. Those who leave will take with them decades of experience running agents, understanding how foreign governments operate, building trust with international counterparts, and spotting meaningful anomalies.

Turning over the entire intelligence workforce will set the United States back incalculably in terms of its ability to both understand the world and act effectively against its adversaries. Consider Iran, an opaque, authoritarian foe whose powerful supreme leader is 85 years old. When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dies, events will unfold quickly on the ground: internal power struggles in Tehran, opportunistic maneuvers in the region. The U.S. government will not want to be on a learning curve at that moment . . . . . Instead the Trump administration is choosing to put the United States at a deficit.

The same is true in the global influence stakes. U.S. adversaries, including Russia and China, are engaged in information operations that actively seek to polarize and inflame American society. The new U.S. administration appears to be ceding that ground to them. The State Department office that combats foreign state-sponsored disinformation had already closed. Now the Department of Homeland Security has put staff members who work on foreign influence operations on administrative leave. The FBI has closed its foreign influence task force.  , , , , hostile governments will be the ones endangering America’s civil liberties, and manipulating its public discourse, if the U.S. allows them to participate unrestrainedly in its domestic political space.

America’s foes are surely observing the chaos in Washington and looking for espionage opportunities. They will find them. Four weeks into Donald Trump’s new administration, lax security practices have created all manner of risk. The CIA has provided employee data on unsecured systems. Staff members from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are downloading onto private servers information that foreign governments would pay dearly for (or use other espionage techniques to obtain). DOGE is apparently cavalier about exposing American citizens to danger—and about the government’s duty of care in protecting the identities of those who protect the country. The Bureau of Fiscal Services recommends that DOGE’s access to Treasury’s payments system be monitored as an insider threat.

The courts or Congress could reassert their constitutional prerogatives and slow or stop some of these actions. But the upheaval that has already occurred in the departments responsible for national security, together with the deficiencies of judgment displayed by some of the president’s Cabinet appointees, has already made America more vulnerable and less equipped to understand the threats it faces.

The Onion has headlined a satirical article “FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot to Just Sit Back and Enjoy Collapse of United States.” Americans will be lucky if that’s all their adversaries do.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty